The Souvenir Museum, Elizabeth McCracken [bill gates best books .txt] 📗

Jack, examining a menu outside a café, “we should come back,” but Sadie was looking at the canal in front of them.

“I like a canal,” she said.

“You hated Venice.”

“Yes. True. Let Venice sink! Are we almost there?”

“Nearly. Prinsengracht. That’s our address.”

Houseboats all along the canal. Jack had asked his Dutch brother-in-law, Piet, for advice on where to stay, but Piet was from Rotterdam, had gone back there after his wife’s death, insisted that Amsterdam was a Mickey Mouse city. “Come to Rotterdam,” Piet said, and they would, after Amsterdam.

There it was: a white houseboat. It looked good, but you never really knew till you got in. Jack texted the landlady, and they went to a nearby bar to wait for her. When you fly overnight to Europe you’re allowed to have beer for breakfast. That was one of their inviolable rules.

Beer for breakfast was what they had instead of children; trips to Europe every three years, indulgence. In nearly twenty years they had lived through the varieties of international practicalities: traveler’s checks, phone cards, internet cafés—how devoted they’d been to internet cafés!—paying for wireless in coffee shops, cheap burner phones they needed to top up in shady convenience stores, and now: nothing. Their cell phone company offered unlimited data. They had filled their wallets with euros from an ATM at the airport and had credit cards with no international transaction fee. They would never be lost. They still could be cheated.

Occasionally Sadie thought about the life they might have had with children. No better, probably. She was nearly forty. A child was unlikely but, yes, you elderly Valerts, technically possible, though none of your business. Jack was forty-six, his possibilities undimmed, except for the ones that involved fame and fortune. They’d chosen Amsterdam so that they could see Piet afterward, and because it was a city they had no memories of. They lived in America and wished they lived elsewhere. They’d always thought they might someday. Now elsewhere, geopolitically speaking, was narrowing to England, which was, according to Jack, as bad as where they were. Surely not, said Sadie. “I wish it weren’t,” said Jack.

Another reason to be legally married: the despots of the world still cared about things like that. They might need proof that they belonged together.

The landlady was a tall woman in her fifties, in a black crocheted cap shaped like a riding helmet. “Welcome!” she said as they crossed the street to the quay, pausing for a woman in a business suit on a bicycle, a dreadlocked white man on a bicycle, the handsomest old man Sadie had ever seen on a bicycle. “I am Cari. Your first time in Holland?”

“Yes,” said Sadie.

“Yes,” said Jack. “Well, I was here as a kid.”

“Goot!” said Cari. “The lock!” She brandished a key on a small block of wood, and with her other hand cupped the padlock on the boat’s hatch, fit them together, looked at first Jack and then Sadie to see if they understood this mystery: key, lock, access. They nodded.

She pulled up the hatch to reveal a small ladder down and announced, “You must always go backward,” while descending forward. “Two hands. Here we go.”

The inside of the boat was beautiful, painted in thick white blurring paint. The couches were white, the floor, the cabinets. The room was bigger than their living room at home, though low-ceilinged, with a line of square windows on both sides. The decorative pillows were pony patterned. Cari began to open cupboards—“You have a dishwasher, refrigerator. At night you put the padlock on the inside of the hatch, when you leave, on the outside. Garbage you deliver to the bridge—well, at any rate it is all here.” She patted a binder.

“It’s lovely,” said Jack.

“Yes, it is,” said Cari. She looked around the room. “It is very lovely.”

She shook their hands, and then went up the ladder and out the hatch. “Shall I close?” she called down. “You have the lock!”

“Yes, please,” said Jack.

The rules: Beer for breakfast. Don’t carry your passports on you. Unpack as soon as you can. Sadie sat down on the sofa.

“Don’t fall asleep!” Jack said.

“I won’t.”

The bed was beneath the wheelhouse, king-sized, on a shelf. Jack reckoned he would only just be able to sit up in bed, though Sadie would have no problem. Another rule: in any bed in any part of the world, they took their habitual sides, no matter how splendid or miserable. In this case, Sadie would face the water, and he the stone wall. That was all right. He took the little ladder to the right of the bed up to the old wheelhouse, now a sitting area with benches and a tiny bar and a framed picture of Anne Frank. Windows all around. To his right people walked along the quay and dodged cyclists; ahead, a huge church; to the left, the Anne Frank House, or the buildings all around the Anne Frank House, the front building that had always hidden it, the modern addition for admissions, with its gift shop and café.

Life was rotten, he thought, but happily, because Amsterdam was excellent, cold, the sky blue, his wife by law beer-sleepy in a boat, he in a glass box, ready to be admired. Look at that man! He has rented a boat for his wife!

You might change your life at any moment; they had. They could continue to. Before they’d met, Sadie was unpassported, untraveled: Europe, Jack thought (grandly, accurately), was a present he’d given her. To move is to change. Even if they had a child—this was his secret, that he’d begun to dream of children—they could tuck a kid under one arm and keep going. What could ever stop them from traveling, in this wide world? Plenty, it turned out: themselves, the world, the people in charge. Downstairs Sadie had already taken off her shoes and was reading a book on the elegant sectional sofa.

“How is it?” he asked.

“Not sure.”

“What’s it about?”

“Not sure about that, either.” She put